Kon-Tiki

Kon-Tiki: “The balsa wood raft Kon-Tiki was launched in 1947 and was named after the Inca sun god Viracocha, for whom ‘Kon-Tiki’ was said to be an old name. The raft hoisted sail outside the port of Callào in Peru with 6 men onboard. Norwegians Thor Heyerdahl, Herman Watzinger, Knut Haugland, Torstein Raaby and Erik Hesselberg, and a Swede, Bengt Danielsson. Heyerdahl was out to prove that people from South America could have settled Polynesia in pre-Columbian times. His aim in mounting the Kon-Tiki expedition was to show, by using only the materials available to those people at the time, that there was no technical reasons to prevent them from sailing from South America to the South Pacific.”